Evelyn Dunbar
Evelyn Mary Dunbar (1906–1960) was a British war artist. She was the only salaried woman artist of the painters and sculptors employed during World War II by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC)[1] Her businesslike production of official war art uniquely documented women's engagement with the war, especially "land girls" recruited to the Women's Land Army.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Evelyn Mary Dunbar was born in Reading on 18 December 1906.[2]
Educated at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, Dunbar’s first foray into commercial artistry was illustrating children's stories. Prior to 1939, while still a student at The Royal College of Art, she worked collaboratively as a muralist, most significantly in Brockley, Kent at Brockley Boys' School.[3] Up to and during the production of 'The Brockley Murals' she had a close, if not romantic, association with her tutor, the artist Charles Mahoney (1903–1968).[4] An enthusiastic gardener, she collaborated with Mahoney to write and illustrate Gardeners’ Choice (Routledge, 1937).[5] Routledge had already noted the potential of Evelyn Dunbar as an illustrator when she added little pen and ink chapter motifs to The Scots Weekend and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer, a 'cultural Scots holiday guide' edited by Donald and Catherine Carswell (1936).
A later collaborative publication was A Book of Farmcraft (Longmans, 1942) with Michael Greenhill, a recruiter of Land Army girls at Sparsholt training centre[6] out of which Dunbar's 'official war paintings' issued.
In 1942 Dunbar married a Royal Air Force Flying Officer (later Flight Lieutenant), Roger Folley, who was employed during and after World War II as an agricultural economist. The marriage was childless. An extant Evelyn Dunbar letter (sold at T.W. Gaze Auctions January 2012) contains Evelyn's thoughts about having children c.1940. In the 1950's up to her untimely death Evelyn Dunbar regularly fostered two boys during school holidays. The boys were resident at a local boarding school for 'maladjusted children' (The Caldecott Community) located close to where Evelyn Dunbar and her husband ('Mr. & Mrs. Folley') lived at their Kent North Downs "Staple Farm" Hastingleigh home.
In 1956 ‘ED’, as she tended to sign her paintings, accepted an invitation by Dora Cohen, the charismatic founder principal of Bletchley Park Training College in Buckinghamshire to paint two large commemorative panels for the college library. The panels were based on Dunbar's interpretation of the College emblem, a ‘horn and alpha within omega symbolism'. This referred to the College motto “In my end is my beginning”. The symbol of Alpha (a bright bare bodied boy in two-tone swim trunks holding a bugle in one hand and a 'rod' in the other) was modelled on Dunbar's fostered younger Caldecott Community charge which she utilised, as she did with another older fostered youth, in varied of the artist's commissions and latter sketches.
Dunbar, who was a Christian Scientist, continued to receive commissions for portraiture and landscape painting up to her sudden death at age 54, which occurred while she was out strolling with her husband on the North Downs combe below their home in Hastingleigh, Kent. Roger Folley died in 2008 at age 95, after a short illness.
[edit] Museums and galleries
Evelyn Dunbar’s paintings, drawings and other artwork are held by The Imperial War Museum, Tate Britain, Arts Council of Great Britain, Cambridgeshire County Council, UK Government Art Collection, Wye Agricultural College, Kent (now merged into Imperial College London), Manchester Art Gallery, Oxford Brookes University, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth, the Tullie House Museum as well as by private individuals in Britain and abroad.
An Evelyn Dunbar retrospective at the St. Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington, Hampshire in November 2006 coincided with the publication of Dr. Gill Clarke's "Evelyn Dunbar - War & Country". Dr. Gill Clarke further curated a second exhibition entitled "The Women's Land Army - A Portrait" complementing a new publication and exhibition of the same name at the St. Barbe Museum in November 2008.
[edit] References
[edit] Sources
- Dr. Gill Clarke, MBE: Evelyn Dunbar, War and Country Sansom & Company Ltd. 2006
- Dr. Gill Clarke, MBE: The Women's Land Army - A Portrait Sansom & Company Ltd. 2008
[edit] Notes
 |
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009) |
- ^ Not to be confused with the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.
- ^ Windsor, Alan. "Dunbar (married name Folley), Evelyn Mary (1906–1960), painter". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63781. Retrieved 2010-02-15.
- ^ Now subsumed into the London Borough of Lewisham
- ^ Gill Clarke, Evelyn Dunbar, War and Country Sansom & Company Ltd. 2006
- ^ Mahoney's name appears as "Cyril".
- ^ Now Sparsholt College, Hampshire
